A Little Life

""5""/5. 

I highly recommend leaving this book alone.

Short version: it's like watching Requiem for a Dream, but instead of the story crescendoing in 2 hours, it just keeps going, darker and more devastating.

I will avoid mentioning any details about the story itself or the characters, and instead, I will just review the process of reading [book:A Little Life|22822858].

Goodreads gives its rating scale the following labels: “1: did not like it”, “2: it was ok”, “3: liked it”, “4: really like it”, and “5: it was amazing”. After finishing this book and sitting on it for a while, I couldn’t rate it on this scale. None of the labels really resonated with the experience of reading it.

On one hand, the book is excellently written. The roster of characters is rich and they are individually well fleshed out, each with their own motivations, their own calling, their own demons. The narration is so rich in detail about their passions (art, architecture, cooking, law, mathematics..) that it quickly tricks you into believing in their existence, into caring about them. The prose is beautiful, painfully so at times. There is a deceitful warmth in the way small moments are tenderly and exquisitely told that it may lull you into believing that everything will be alright in the end. The writing in general is almost good enough to be worth the price of admission alone.

On the other hand, I <b>hated</b> reading this book. 

I don’t believe that every book should be “enjoyable” to read ‒some of the most edifying reading experiences I had were about those corners of human experiences that are uncomfortable, even vile and unhinged‒ but boy, does this book feel like an exercise in sadomasochism: masochism because reading some of the passages feels physically and mentally painful, and sadism because you keep reading still, almost knowing with some guilty assurance that the pain isn’t going to stop any soon.

[author:Hanya Yanagihara|6571447] spent the 700 pages of this book being a malevolent god: she taketh as soon as she giveth. Although she positions each of her characters somewhat obviously on the Good-Bad spectrum, letting you develop empathy for the good ones, every single one of them suffers. And suffers again. Especially the most vulnerable ones. And when you think they may get a second chance ‒a little life, one might say‒, they suffer some more. There is no light, just the tunnel. No retribution, no respite, and absolutely no catharsis. 

I started reading <i>A Little Life</i> because I wanted to read a novel about friendship, as there aren’t sadly many of those around. And while the novel starts there, exploring a beautiful friendship for 4 boys coming from different walks of life, it morphs into a psychologically rich exploration of the concept of belonging, of pain, of worthiness, of unredeemable destruction. The internal monologues of each character uncoiling their trauma, especially as the book progresses, are all written in sublime pathos, which made it so uncomfortably relatable that I started wondering if reading more would make it rub more deeply into my soul, never to be cleaned again.

While I hated the experience of reading this, I cannot say that I regret it. I know I will never read it again, and I will never recommend it to anyone. But like one of those realistic nightmares that weaves itself into your waking life, I don’t see myself forgetting about it any time soon.